Does anybody doubt cigarette smoking harms the
smoker's health? No. It's a killer, eating away at the lungs of the smoker
until respiratory function is hampered and, in too many cases every year, cancer
is diagnosed. Correctly, regulators have created disincentives (think taxes),
legal limits on purchases (think minors) and waged massive public information
campaigns (think ads featuring those with tracheotomies and photos of scarred
lung tissue).

But is second- or third-hand smoke in a wide-open
setting a hazard to others? That's less clear, as definitive proof that such
smoke is a public health hazard remains lacking. Yet governments across America
have instituted bans on smoking in many wide-open public places. And such bans
typically win the public's favor, because if smoking is known to be bad why
wouldn't its prohibition be good?

The arguments by public officials instituting the
bans are typically the same: Smokers hurt innocent nonsmokers. Public smoking exemplifies
the wrong adult behavior for children who might otherwise go untempted. Smokers
create a litter problem that, among other things, harms wildlife and the
environment.

What goes unsaid, however, is that smokers are at
the center of an ethical public health dilemma, and their targeting places
government on a slippery slope: Many public officials simply do not like the
idea of smoking and so regulate to that ideal. In so doing, they undermine
democracy and personal liberty. More narrowly, they make a joke of health
policymakers whose decisions require evidence and the public's trust.

Portland Commissioner Amanda Fritz, who oversees the
Bureau of Parks & Recreation, has asked an all-volunteer parks board to
investigate whether it makes sense to ban smoking in the city's more than 200
parks. To her credit, Fritz worries about the health of people and ensuring
that all who visit a city park can do so without impediment or threat. And she
no doubt has noticed that park systems in San Jose, Los Angeles, New York and other
cities have successfully instituted bans on smoking. But her request should be
met by her advisers with rigor in the search for evidence and a flat refusal to
follow the pack nationally. To jump ahead, they should tell her: No.

Which, in the instance of a ban in public parks,
would reduce public assets to instruments of propaganda. It is simply not the
province of the Bureau of Parks & Recreation to contribute to a national
drive to "denormalize" smoking. We know no smokers, meanwhile, who are unaware it's
bad for them and, likely, bad for others in confined, enclosed spaces. We know
plenty, however, whose freedom would be unjustifiably clipped by a ban in parks
and whose scapegoating amounts to behavior management for not only them but for
nonsmoking park visitors.

Andy Nelson, who chairs the parks board, hit the
right note in telling The Oregonian's Andrew Theen: "We're just trying to get
our facts and information down."